“And music and butterflies,” added Verid. “And of course,” she added thoughtfully, “one’s reputation.”
Reputation was a matter of concern in the Nucleus these days—in particular, the reputation of the Prime Guardian. Hyen’s sex life was a major scandal, even on the respected Anaeaon channel. Raincloud could not figure out why; he sounded no more disreputable than the average Elysian.
SHE MET THE L’LIITES THAT AFTERNOON AT A RECEPTION at their embassy. The trade delegates were nothing like what she expected. Instead of their native dress, which resembled the wide-bottomed trousers that Clickers wore, these L’liites wore talars of gleaming seasilk hung with enough ropes of gems to shame even a Valan gold merchant. Their banquet tables displayed whole roast lambs and suckling pigs, and overflowed with the rarest of fruits and delicacies unknown to her. They hardly looked like paupers showing up for a handout.
The delegates spoke fluent Valan most of the time, and Elysian when appropriate, descending to L’liite only for the purpose of confidential disclosures. One attaché drew Raincloud aside. “Surely you understand us, Sister,” he murmured discreetly. “Your own people chose to leave our world for the same reasons that many still seek to leave today. Our world is too small—what can we do?”
“It’s regrettable,” Raincloud replied cautiously.
“When will our Fold partners see reason? When will another planet be terraformed?”
She took a breath. “Shora is not the place for such discussion.”
The man touched her arm and drew closer. “Tell your ‘guardians’ this: If no new worlds are available, desperate millions will seek out the old ones.” He drew away, leaving Raincloud speechless at this threat.
The next day, despite the bank crisis, Iras met Raincloud at the circus as planned. Her curls radiated like the Bronze Skyan sun at dawn; what stunning braids they would make. “You should be flattered,” Iras told her. “Nowadays, I keep so few Visiting Days, I hardly see anyone.” As she spoke, a servo came down the aisle, not one of the food vendors, but a security octopod. Iras hastily slipped her holocube into a deep pocket of her train.
“A reminder, Citizen,” called the octopod, flexing its tentacles emphatically. “Three more days to catch up on visitation before your accounts close.”
“Yes, I know,” Iras muttered, looking off toward the parade of elephants entering the ring.
“Goddess,” exclaimed Raincloud. “What will they do to you?”
“They’ll freeze all my accounts; even my house won’t obey me anymore. Then I’ll be off to the Palace of Rest.” Iras spoke from experience, Raincloud suspected. As the octopod moved off, a bell tone emanated from the pocket in Iras’s folded up train. She pulled out the holocube and listened to the gesticulating figure within its depths. “I told you, I can’t touch anything to do with terraforming,” Iras replied to the cube. “White holes for geomorphic development, yes; even interstellar missiles, we can channel the funds. But not terraforming.”
“Valan missiles?” Raincloud could not help asking, as Iras put away the cube. “How do the Sharers let you get away with that?”
“Did I say a word about missiles? You didn’t hear it, did you?” Iras responded carelessly. “It’s channeled through intermediaries on several planets. If the Sharers know, they look the other way. After all, Urulan threatens them, too.”
That did not sound at all like Sharer logic, Raincloud thought.
“You’re so understanding about my interruptions,” Iras added apologetically. “Foreigners know the meaning of hard work.”
This annoyed her. “Work isn’t everything. Only a mole grubs for food all day. People need to take time up in the highest Hills, to commune with the Dark One.”
Before Iras could reply, an elephant appeared in the audience behind her, raising its trunk with a shriek; a real live elephant, smell and all. Raincloud gaped in astonishment, as the elephant parade turned into a magic act. There were swirling lights, and men with their heads cut off, and a goddess who levitated. It was a good show, as good as the foreign acrobats, yet somehow, after four months in Helicon, Raincloud had grown rather used to “magic.”
“What do you think of our Prime’s latest scandal?” Iras asked. “Hyen may actually lose the next election.”
Raincloud shook her head in puzzlement. “I thought Elysians scarcely cared what their menfolk were up to.”
“It’s not what he does that counts. He’s done that for years. He collects his lovers, of both sexes, sometimes twenty in one night. He likes different positions, sometimes one partner below and one on top, both at once. It’s quite the thing, I’m told, in the night spots of the Seventh Octant.”
“I thought you said Elysians were not acrobats.”
Iras laughed. “Not in public—that’s the point. Hyen is into gaming, too; whoever lost had to do it in public. Hyen lost.”
Raincloud frowned in puzzlement. “In public?”
“On a holostage.”
“Oh, I see.” She shook her head in disgust.
“You must have seen it; it’s been all over the news.”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve heard only cryptic references.”
“Your house,” Iras said. “You’re registered as a shon, aren’t you?”
“Yes, of course.” Hence Hawktalon’s complaint at her lost privileges.
“Then all your reception is screened and censored.”
“Thank goodness,” Raincloud said with a shudder. But then she wondered, what else might be censored?
“Elysians are claustrophobic; we all have to deal with each other for a thousand years. A reputation lost is irretrievable. Unless you get ‘rehabilitated.’” Iras’s face, lined with strain, belied her light words.
Raincloud said, “All those Visiting Days—you must be fined to death, on top of everything.” And the “Palace of Rest”; what was that like? An Elysian prison?
“The L’liites have cost us more than all the fines,” said Iras. “I’m waiting to hear from them right now on a rescheduling plan. As for my division, we’ll take pay cuts. I expect I’ll have to sell one of my homes in Letheon.” Iras accepted a drink and a flower cake from a black-clothed waiter servo. The show was at intermission, and the noise had abated. The departed elephant had deposited something real on the floor; floor cleaners were collecting the mess to scuttle off with it, to cycle into a fresh batch of flower cakes somewhere.
Raincloud thought of the L’liite reception the day before, and the trade delegate’s threat, which of course she could not disclose. “Their delegates certainly looked well off,” she observed.
“Of course, what else do you expect?” said Iras. “Impoverished people always put on a brave show.”
“Their governments do, you mean. Why is L’li in such bad shape?” Raincloud wondered. “All those trillions invested over the last century, and still their people starve.”
“Their regime is vastly corrupt.”
“If you know that, then why hand them cash?”
Iras shrugged. Then her face changed; she shivered suddenly and crossed her arms, pulling at her talar. “It’s cold in here,” she said abruptly. “Let’s go out.”
Raincloud followed, perplexed, for she felt no cold. Outside, in the street-tunnel, the crablike cleaners probed every crack of the passage, whose surface inclined lazily up into the facades of music halls and butterfly pavilions. The scent of passionflowers drifted over. Raincloud unfolded her own train as the trainsweeps followed Iras into the stream of Elysians, their trains extending and swaying like giant ribbons. Iras shivered again and she walked briskly, her train stretching at the trainsweeps which hurried to catch up with her.
“It’s a chance we took,” Iras said at last. Raincloud walked beside her, hoping the trains would not tangle. “At the time, L’li had a progressive young leader who promised drastic reforms. But she died, of course. You foreigners have an annoying habit of dying off and leaving affairs in the worst hands. Nothing personal.�
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That was true, Raincloud thought. She often despaired of the city folk elected to govern Bronze Sky; the good ones seemed to fall the quickest. “But just a few weeks ago, you were concluding yet another deal with L’li.”
Iras turned off the street-tunnel into a garden of heliconians, orange and black ones, flitting about the tangle of passionflowers. She stopped to meditate. Raincloud liked best to watch the bristly caterpillars, devouring the leaves as a newborn devoured milk.
“We know we’ll never see those loans paid,” Iras said abruptly. “We pity those people.”
Raincloud’s eyes widened. She watched Iras curiously.
“It horrifies us, to—” Iras broke off, breathing quickly. “To be what we are, in a universe of others whose lives are brutish and short. The L’liites especially, whose children die of the most gruesome diseases. How could we not pity them?”
She absorbed this with uneasy sympathy. Verid had blamed the crisis on greed. But compassion mixed with self-deceit was little better.
AT DINNER, SUNFLOWER TOOK APART HIS GRILLED cheese. Picking out the cheese, he arranged the two pieces of bread next to each other so their corners touched.
“Eat, Sunny, please,” Blackbear insisted.
Raincloud frowned at the child, though the sight of her youngest always melted her heart. “Sunny, your food is not a toy.”
“It’s not real food, either,” said Hawktalon.
She eyed her daughter intently.
“She’s been like that all day,” Blackbear muttered. “She walked up to the servos and told them they weren’t real people. She even told the embryo simulator.”
Such impertinence could only be dealt with after dinner. Raincloud looked at Sunflower again.
“It’s a bu’fly,” Sunflower explained, fingering the bread slices.
“Well, eat your butterfly, please.”
“She’ll cry.”
Hawktalon laughed. “She’ll cry! The butterfly’ll cry if he eats her, Mum!”
“You’re excused from dinner,” Raincloud told her daughter. “Please undo your hair for your father to rebraid tonight.”
Hawktalon shook her frizzled braids about her face. “I won’t have them done. Nobody else has to have braids.”
Silence fell. Blackbear stared in amazement.
“You’re a firstborn Clicker goddess,” Raincloud stated flatly. “You’d be a laughingstock without braids.”
“No other shonlings wear them,” Hawktalon said. “Why can’t I go live in the shon?”
“You’re not a shonling.”
“Sure I am. This is a shon.”
“Then you’re already in one.” Her firstborn was getting to match her at linguistics, Raincloud thought.
“I mean a real shon. Like the one Lorl keeps telling me about.”
Blackbear put in, “I told you to stay away from Lorl.”
“Only orphans live away from their families,” Raincloud told her.
“But the shon is a family, too. The shon has professional parents—they’ve been parents for hundreds of years, and they really know all about it.”
Silence again. Blackbear gave Raincloud a look as painful as she felt. Was this the child she had nursed for three years and carried on her back for six?
“The shon isn’t what you think,” Raincloud warned. “It’s not toys and ice cream all day.”
“Of course not, Mother. It’s like school all day. They learn to build spaceships and computers, and write music dramas, and practice citizenship. They study foreign languages and have multicultural experiences.”
Sunflower was rubbing his eyes, and his face wrinkled. “Doggie,” he moaned unsteadily, as if he had just remembered. “I want Dog-gie!”
Blackbear sighed. “He’s going to cry over the trainsweep. He still does this two or three times a day.”
Hawktalon said, “I miss Doggie, too.”
“How would you like to go visit Doggie, next Visiting Day?” Raincloud offered.
The seven-year-old jumped up from her seat, her hands shoving the table forward. “Visit Doggie! Hurray!”
“Doggie, Doggie, Doggie!” said Sunflower.
“Very well, we’ll visit Doggie—if you get your braids done and behave like a goddess from now on.”
THAT NIGHT, RAINCLOUD LAY ON HER BACK IN BED, while Blackbear gently stroked the taut skin of her belly. The light was dim and golden; they had experimented with the house to get it just right.
“Do you feel it yet?” he asked.
She paused, trying to feel, then shook her head. “It’s not yet quickened.” The quickening in the fifth month, when one actually felt the little one moving inside for the first time, was the point when one announced one’s condition to the High Priestess and the clan. Before quickening, the fetus had no existence, and the woman who carried it might put an end to it at will. After it quickened, one was honor-bound to inform the High Priestess.
For Raincloud it made no difference, as she wanted her third child badly, even hungrily; she longed to breathe the scent of its soft hair, as its head rested beneath her chin. She could hardly wait to write the High Priestess, and her mother and father, and Nightstorm.
Blackbear stroked her belly. His mushroom rose and expanded gently. Then he looked up, suddenly alert. “I forgot something. A letter came for you.”
“A letter? From Bronze Sky?”
“It’s got the seal of the Goddess.”
The High Priestess. Why would the High Priestess write her? Such news could only be very good—or very bad. She felt cold and shivered involuntarily.
Blackbear had already risen to fetch the letter. Sure enough, the parchment was sealed with the waxen imprint of the Dark One, her upper arms rising to the dance, her middle arms clenching the snake, her lower arms cradling the child. The Snake’s Day was past; the Day of the Child came next, a few months off. She would miss the Day of the Child in Tumbling Rock this year, she thought with a pang. She pried off the seal.
From the High Priestess of the Seventh Hill of the Dark Goddess, to Raincloud, daughter of Windrising, granddaughter of Wolf in the Wind. Raincloud’s grandmother Wolf in the Wind had given the Windclan its name; it numbered seven daughters and twenty-one granddaughters. The octogenarian Wolf in the Wind still convened the clan council, but her daughters took care of daily affairs. Upon the Clanmother’s death, the daughters would move out to found their own clans.
Whereas the Dark One in her wisdom has made our clan daughter Falcon Soaring unable to conceive of her own…She frowned, remembering. Her cousin Falcon Soaring had lost her ovaries after infection from a botched cyst removal. Not all the mountain doctors were as competent as Blackbear.
The Dark Goddess since time before memory has called all our daughters the daughters of one mother. So, as our daughter seeks a child, let one of our sisters embrace this honor.
The parchment shook in her hand. Honor—a gift of life.
“What is it?” Blackbear insisted.
“They’ve given up on Falcon Soaring,” she told him quietly. “She’s been declared infertile, and they’re calling for someone to donate a child.” That was the custom, when a goddess could not bear one of her own. Usually another clan daughter, a sister or cousin, provided.
“But—but why didn’t they send her to the clinic at Founders?” Blackbear exclaimed. “I told her, at Founders they can fix that.”
“Really?”
“Sure. They generate pseudoovarian tissue in culture, using her own undifferentiated stem cells. Then the egg’s fertilized in vitro, and there you go.”
“I see.” She thought a moment. “If it’s that easy, how come the Elysians don’t do it?”
He paused. “That’s a good question. I think their longevity treatment scrambles the methylation of their chromosomes.” Both egg and sperm DNA have special methylation patterns which the embryo needs. “Anyway, that’s no problem for Falcon Soaring.”
Confused feelings filled her. If she were hom
e, Raincloud would surely have offered her own child. She wished she could, and yet felt overwhelming relief that she could not, and shame at her own relief. “We must do something,” she said at last. “They have to send her to the clinic.”
“Of course,” agreed Blackbear. “That’s what she wants, a child of her own. I’ll line her up with the best specialist at Founders.”
Raincloud thought it over. She could do better than offer her own child—she could help her cousin have one of her own. “The thing is, how to bring it up? You know how touchy Clanmother gets after she’s made a decision.” She nodded. “When mine quickens, I’ll call Mother to announce it. Then I’ll talk to her about Falcon Soaring.”
Chapter 2
THE POLISHED OBSIDIAN GODDESS FACED THEM AS THEY knelt for their morning devotions. Blackbear eyed the snake transfixed forever between Her jaws, and the child suckling in her lower arms. Your child is My child, She seemed to say.
Raincloud’s features glowed with the flush of pregnancy, as she began the morning prayer. “Blessed are Your great arms that made the serpent, Your full breasts that feed all children of creation, and Your burning fingers that lift up our spirit in the dance of joy.”
Hawktalon’s new braids gleamed, but she slouched forward and pouted. Usually she was so eager to be grown-up, but today Blackbear had to nudge her. She straightened her back and told the Goddess, “You’re not a real person, either.”
Raincloud yanked the child to her feet; Hawktalon gave a sharp cry. “For shame,” exclaimed Raincloud. “You’ll spend the whole day in your room.”
“Then I’ll never come out,” Hawktalon called as she was hauled off, attempting the “Tumbling Rock” without success. “I’ll tell the nanoplast never to make a door again!”
Blackbear cradled Sunflower on his lap. “Shall I stay home with her?” he asked as Raincloud returned.
“Perhaps,” she said doubtfully. “She might like that too well. Let her miss rei-gi practice, then take her to the lab as usual. That ought to be punishment enough.”
IN THE TRANSIT VESICLE HAWKTALON WAS WITHDRAWN, unresponsive to her father’s friendly remarks. But she behaved herself otherwise. Sunflower avidly watched the news on the holostage. A derelict L’liite starship had just made an emergency landing on Valedon. It held nearly a thousand illegal immigrants, half of them children with staring eyes and skeletal faces. To ship them back to L’li would be expensive, perhaps impossible politically.
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